The Houston Chronicle is the largest
daily newspaper in Texas, USA. As of March 2008, it is the
ninth-largest newspaper by circulation in the United States. With
the demise of its long-time rival the Houston Post, its nearest major
competitors are located in Dallas-Fort Worth.

History

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1901:
Marcellus E. Foster

The Houston Chronicle was founded in 1901 by a former
reporter for the now-defunct Houston Post, Marcellus E. Foster.
Foster, who had been covering the Spindletop oil boom for the Post,
invested in Spindletop and took $30 of the return on that
investment — at the time equivalent to a week's wages — and used it
to found the Chronicle.

The Chronicle's first edition was published on October
14, 1901 and sold for two cents per copy, at a time when most
papers sold for five cents each. At the end of its first month in
operation, the Chronicle had a circulation of 4,378 —
roughly one tenth of the population of Houston at the time.[3] Within
the first year of operation, the paper purchased and consolidated
the Daily Herald.

In 1908, Jesse H. Jones, a local businessman, constructed a new
office and plant for the paper in exchange for a half-interest in
the company.[4]

Goodfellows

In 1911, City Editor George Kepple started Goodfellows. On a Christmas Eve in
1911, Kepple passed a hat among the Chronicle's reporters
to collect money to buy toys for a shoe-shine boy.

Goodfellows continues today through donations made by the
newspaper and its readers. It has grown into a city-wide program
that provides needy children between the ages of 2 and 10 with toys
during the winter holidays. In 2003, Goodfellows distributed almost
250,000 toys to more than 100,000 needy children in the Greater Houston
area.

1926
- 1956: Jesse H. Jones

In 1926, Jesse
H. Jones became the sole owner of the paper. In 1937, Jesse H.
Jones transferred ownership of the paper to the newly-established
Houston Endowment Inc. Jones
retained the title of publisher until his death in 1956.

1956
- 1965: John T. Jones

The board of Houston Endowment named John T. Jones, nephew of
Jesse H. Jones, as editor of the Chronicle. Houston Endowment
president, J. Howard Creekmore, was named publisher. In 1961, John
T. Jones hired William P. Steven as editor. Steven had previously
been editor of the Tulsa Tribune and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and credited with
turning around the declining readership of both papers. His
progressive political philosophy soon created conflict with the
very conservative views of the Houston Endowment board. In 1964,
the Chronicle purchased the assets of its evening newspaper
competitor, the Houston Press,[5]
becoming the only evening newspaper in the city.

In 1965, both John T. Jones and William P. Steven left the
Chronicle. J. Howard Creekmore, president of the Houston Endowment,
took John Jones' place at the Chronicle. Everett D.
Collier replaced Steven as editor. Collier remained in this
position until his retirement in 1979.

In 1968, the Chronicle set a Texas newspaper circulation
record. In 1981, the business pages — which up until then had been
combined with sports — became its own section of the newspaper.

1987:
Hearst

On May 1, 1987, the Hearst Corporation purchased the
Houston Chronicle from Houston Endowment for $415 Million.
Richard J. V. Johnson, who had joined the paper as a copy editor in
1956, and worked up to executive vice president in 1972, and
president in 1973, remained as chairman and publisher until he
retired April 1, 2002.[6] He was
succeeded by Jack Sweeney.

In 1994, the Chronicle switched to being a morning-only
paper. With the demise of the Houston Post the following
year, the Chronicle became Houston's sole major daily
newspaper.

The paper employs nearly 2,000 people, including approximately
300 journalists. In
addition, the Chronicle contracts with multiple
distributors who circulate and deliver copies of the newspaper.

A longtime Chronicle officer was John Hulen Murphy,
I, the assistant to Richard Johnson, former executive vice
president of the Texas Daily Newspaper Association, and a
newspaperman, mostly in Houston, for seventy-four years.

2002: Holocaust Museum Houston awarded the
Chronicle its "Guardian of the Human spirit" award. The
presenter, Janis Goldstein, said the award was given "because the
Houston Chronicle embraces the causes most dear to it with
a depth and scope that goes well beyond what is expected." Also,
that "the Chronicle gives of itself to build a community
that will embrace tolerance, understanding, and diversity and will
speak out against prejudice and unfairness of any kind." [4]

Individual
awards

2003: James Howard Gibbons received third place in the "Hearst
Distinguished Journalism Awards," an internal contest held between
Hearst's newspapers, for his editorial piece When Will the U.S.
Liberate Texas?[6]

2005: Then-White House correspondent Julie Mason was voted by
readers of Wonkette (a
Washington, D.C. political blog) the tongue-in-cheek "Best to Sit
Next to on the Bus (for more than 20 minutes)." (Mason later left
the newspaper and now reports for the Washington
Examiner).

Leon Hale, a
long-time columnist and author of 11 books, recently received the
Lon Tinkle Award for Excellence Sustained Throughout a
Career from the Texas Institute of Letters, of which Hale is
member. [7]

Pulitzer
Prize

The Houston Chronicle is the only newspaper of the '10
largest' in the United States to have never won a Pulitzer Prize
for journalism.

However, the newspaper and its staff have several times been
Pulitzer finalists:

Dudley Althaus - 1992 finalist in international reporting: "For
his articles on the causes of the cholera epidemic in Peru and Mexico." [8]

Nick Anderson - 2007 finalist for editorial cartooning: "For
his pungent cartoons on an array of issues, and for his bold use of
animation." [10] Anderson won
the Pulitzer in 2005 when working for the The Courier-Journal,
Louisville, Ky. [11]

Staff - 2009 finalist for breaking news coverage: "For taking
full advantage of online technology and its newsroom expertise to
become a lifeline to the city when Hurricane Ike struck, providing
vital minute-by-minute updates on the storm, its flood surge and
its aftermath." [12]

Sections

The Houston Chronicle is divided into several sections:

Front Page (A)

City and State (B)

Sports (C)

Business (D)

Star (E)

Classifieds (F)

On some days, "local" sections (Z) for residents of various
Houston-area neighborhoods appear - Depending on one's residence, a
customer will receive one of the following sections on
Thursdays:

Robert Jensen series on the September 11, 2001 attacks on the
U.S.

In the weeks following the September
11, 2001 attacks the Houston Chronicle published a
series of opinion articles by University of Texas
journalism professor Robert Jensen that asserted the United
States was "just as guilty" as the hijackers in committing acts of
violence and compared that attack with the history of U.S. attacks
on civilians in other countries. The opinion piece resulted in
hundreds of angry letters to the editor and reportedly over 4,000
angry responses to Jensen.[30] Among them
were claims of insensitivity against the newspaper and of giving an
unduly large audience to a position characterized as being
extremist. University of Texas president Larry Faulkner issued a response
denouncing Jenson's as "a fountain of undiluted foolishness on
issues of public policy", noting "[h]e is not speaking in the
University's name and may not speak in its name." [31]

The Chronicle printed four subsequent opinion articles
by Jensen, asserting his case. Jensen is also a regular guest
writer on the opinion page and has published several dozen opinion
articles on other subjects in the Chronicle.

Criticism

Light
rail controversy

The paper's most vocal critics were conservativetalk radio station KSEV and its affiliated weblogs, the now-defunct
Chronically Biased
and Lone Star Times.
Chronically Biased featured a cartoon character named
"Captain Chronicle" who espouses light rail transit as the solution
to all of Houston's problems (including those unrelated to
traffic.) In May 2005 the Harris CountyRepublican Party
joined a short-lived boycott of the newspaper, [32] called for
previously by KSEV hosts. The Republican Party accused the paper of
having a liberal political slant, of biased coverage of the light rail project, of
supporting Planned Parenthood and of waging a
"personal smear campaign" against Houston area congressman Tom DeLay, who was under
criminal indictment.

The newspaper also has had critics on the political left. The
Houston
Press, an alternative weekly tabloid newspaper
that often takes a liberal perspective, used to run a column
entitled "News Hostage", which often critiqued the
Chronicle. Now that paper only occasionally criticizes the
Chronicle in its "Hairballs" column.

In late 2002, Chronicle website managers accidentally
posted an internal memorandum on its Web site, HoustonChronicle.com. The memorandum [33] outlined a
draft agenda of coordinated news articles, editorials, and op-eds
seemingly intended to promote a hotly contested mass
transitreferendum
to expand Houston's controversial METRORail system on the 2003 ballot, which
was later approved narrowly by voters. The memo's anonymous author
proposed supporting the referendum and stated:

"Next November, voters in the city and across the
Metropolitan Transit Authority service area will cast a truly
important vote: They will decide whether Metro should be permitted
to expand our rail rail system beyond the 7-mile South Main line.
There isn't a more critical issue on the horizon.

I propose a series of editorials, editorial cartoons and
Sounding Board columns leading up to the rail referendum, with this
specific objective: Continuing our long standing efforts to make
rail a permanent part of the transit mix here.

The timing, language and approach of the paper's editorials
would, of course, be the decision of the Editorial Board. But I
suggest that they could be built upon and informed by a
news-feature package with an equally specific focus..."

The memorandum then proposed several "investigative" news
stories and editorials designed to examine "the campaign led by Tom DeLay and Bob
Lanier to defeat rail expansion." DeLay, a Houston congressman,
and Lanier, a former mayor of Houston, had both actively opposed
light rail in the past.

The document was online for only an hour, but long enough to be
viewed by some readers. Soon after the Houston Review, a
conservative newspaper published by students at the University of Houston (now
defunct), printed the memo's full text and an accompanying
commentary that criticized the paper for bias toward rail. The
Houston Press also accused the Chronicle of
having a bias toward rail.[34] They dubbed
the paper Houston's "in-house light rail newsletter," described it
as a "tireless promoter of rail," and mocked its editorial board's
portrayal of light rail as the key to making Houston a "world
class" city [35] – a claim
echoed by the city's former mayor, Lee P. Brown, who campaigned on a platform
of bringing light rail to Houston. Other local weekly and monthly
newspapers, including the Houston Forward Times, a local
African-American weekly newspaper, seized
on the controversy, as did local talk radio stations, bloggers, and the
conservative Free
Republic Internet forum.

The Chronicle's response was initially muted. Its first
official response appeared in the "corrections" section later the
same week stating: "An internal Houston Chronicle document
was mistakenly posted to the editorial/opinion area of the Web site
early Thursday morning. We apologize for any confusion it may have
caused." Chronicle editor Jeff Cohen, who gave a statement
in defense of the memorandum: "I make no apologies for having a
thorough discussion of the issue. We have nothing to apologize
for…There was an inadvertent posting of it to the Web site, and I'm
sorry about that, but I make no apologies for the contents of
it."

After the memo's accidental release, the Chronicle's
critics noted that its Editorial Board continued being a vocal
advocate of the expansion of Houston's light rail and charged that
the paper became a partisan participant in the debate over light
rail expansion. According to a content analysis of the paper by the
Houston Review done to support their allegation of bias,
the Houston Chronicle published 5 editorials attacking
rail opponents, 6 editorials promoting or endorsing light rail, 6
news stories attacking the motives of rail opponents, 3 news
stories promoting a criminal investigation of rail opponents, and 1
staff editorial endorsing a criminal investigation of rail
opponents during the course of the election. As the bond referendum
approached, the Houston Chronicle requested that Texans
for True Mobility (TTM), the main critic of METRORail, provide the
paper with a copy of their financial contributor reports. TTM
declined, saying they did not believe the Chronicle would
adequately protect the privacy of their donors.

The Chronicle responded by making a complaint to the
Harris County District Attorney's office asking that Texans for
True Mobility be investigated for potential violations of Texas
election law. The Chronicle alleged that TTM broke a law
requiring PACs to disclose their
donors. Violation of this law, a misdemeanor, is punishable by a
maximum $500 fine. TTM was a registered non-profit501(c)(6) organization and said this status
did not require them to disclose contributors like PACs must do.
The Chronicle argued that the law covered TTM because it
made "paid political moves." Texas campaign law allows nonprofits
to run "educational" advertisements, but those advertisements
cannot endorse specific political positions or people or make a
specific recommendation in a pending election. The dispute was over
whether TTM's advertisements, and specifically the slogans "Metro's
Rail Plan Costs Too Much ... Does Too Little" and "Metro's Plan
Won't Work Here," were specific recommendations on how to vote.

Harris County District Attorney Rosenthal later dismissed the
Chronicle's complaint, finding it without merit on the grounds that
the statute did not apply. Rosenthal's involvement in the probe
itself came under fire by the Houston Press, which in editorials
questioned whether Rosenthal was too close to TTM: from 2000 to
2004, Rosenthal accepted some $30,000 in donations from known TTM
supporters.

Later that year, the group revealed that that their TV and radio
ads were funded by $30,000 in contributions made the day before the
election by two PACs controlled by DeLay.

By comparison with TTM, which was extensively attacked in the
paper's editorials and covered in multiple news stories, the
Chronicle devoted only a portion of one article to the
finances of Texans for Public Transportation (TPT), the main
pro-METRORail group, according to the Houston Review. The
Houston Review further alleged multiple conflicts of
interest in TPT's financing. The report involved fourteen METRORail
contractors and business interests who stood to gain financially
from the project and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to
promote the referendum.[7]

Feuds with KSEV
radio and Bill O'Reilly

In early 2004 the Chronicle was accused of bias and
adding to the family's grief regarding its coverage of the death of
Leroy Sandoval, a soldier from Houston who was killed in Iraq.
Chronicle reporter Lucas Wall visited the family of
Sandoval for an interview about the loss of their loved one.

After the article appeared, Sandoval's family members complained
that a sentence alleging "President Bush's failure to find weapons
of mass destruction" in Iraq misrepresented their views on the war
and President George W. Bush (the Sandoval family was
supportive of the war). The next day Sandoval's stepfather and
sister called into Houston talk radio station KSEV and explained that Wall had pressured them
for a quotation that criticized Bush and then included the line
alleging Bush's "failure" against the wishes of the family.[36]

A bitter on-air showdown ensued between the KSEV radio show
host/owner Dan
Patrick, and an assistant managing editor at the
Chronicle, who defended his reporter's story. The incident
prompted Patrick to join the call for a boycott of the paper.[37] The story was
also picked up by the local Houston television stations and, a week
later, the O'Reilly Factor. The issue cooled down when
Chronicle publisher Jack Sweeney contacted the Sandoval
family to apologize.[38]

Patrick and Bill
O'Reilly have both been involved in subsequent disputes with
the Chronicle over alleged biases and writings pertaining
to each other. [39] In 2005
O'Reilly and then-editorial page editor James Howard Gibbons became
involved in a heated exchange carried out over their respective
media outlets involving a Chronicle editorial that,
according to O'Reilly, seemingly advocated softer treatment for
convicted child sex offenders.

[40] The
Chronicle responded to O'Reilly by editorializing against
the host and accusing him of misrepresenting their position and
misquoting a segment of the editorial. O'Reilly retracted the
erroneous quotation but reiterated his criticism by quoting the
correct editorial, which criticized Florida's Jessica Lunsford Act, espoused
rehabilitation for sex
offenders, and argued that "counseling reduces recidivism". The incident
also prompted O'Reilly to host a segment on liberal bias at the
Houston Chronicle on his March 12 television broadcast,
featuring criticisms of the paper by Patrick.[41]

Purchase of Houston
Post assets

In 1995, the Houston Post ceased operations, leaving
the Chronicle as Houston's only major daily newspaper, and
the Hearst Corporation purchased some of the Post's
assets. Houston Chronicle announced it in a way that
suggested the shutdown and Hearst's purchase of the Post's
assets were simultaneous events. "Post closes; Hearst buys
assets," the Chronicle headline read the day after the
Post was shut.

Internal memos obtained from by FOIA from the Justice Departmentantitrust attorneys who investigated the
closing of the Houston Post said the Chronicle's
parent organization struck a deal to buy the Post six
months before it closed. The memos, first obtained by the
alternative paper the Houston Press, say the
Chronicle's conglomerate and the Post "reached an
agreement in October, 1994, for the sale of Houston Post Co.'s
assets for approximately $120 million." [42]

No anti-trust charges have been filed against the Houston
Chronicle, the Houston Post or against the Hearst
corporation.

Tom DeLay
poll

In January 2006 the Chronicle hired Dr. Richard Murray
of the University of Houston to conduct
an election survey in the district of U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, in light of his
2005 indictment by District Attorney Ronnie Earle for alleged campaign money
violations. The Chronicle claimed that its poll showed "severely
eroded support for U.S. Rep Tom DeLay in his district, most notably
among Republicans who have voted for him before."[43]

Former Texas Secretary of State Jack Rains contacted the
Chronicle's James Howard Gibbons, alleging that the poll
appeared to incorrectly count non-Republican Primary voters in its
sample. Rains also pointed out that Dr. Murray had a conflict of
interest in the poll. Murray's son Keir Murray is a Democratic
political consultant who works for Nick Lampson, DeLay's Democratic
challenger in 2006.[44] In response,
Gibbons denied the methodological flaws in the poll.

The Houston Chronicle is the largest daily newspaper in Texas, USA. As of March2007, it is the ninth largest newspaper circulating in the United States. With the demise of its long-time rival the Houston Post, its nearest major competitors are located in Dallas-Fort Worth.